Archive for the ‘MineCraft’ Category

Since my previous post two things have happened...
First I’ve taken a liking to MineCraft, the builder/explorer indiegame that sold over half a million copies. Secondly – I’ve taken up learning electronics, using Electronics for Dummies, and YouTube ;-).

When I try to learn something new, I always start out with a little project I really want to do. It gives a lot of motivation to get through the ordeal of learning something by yourself.
For a long time, I’ve wanted to be able to program something on the PC which interacts with homemade hardware outside the PC. I had heard about the Arduino (an open source programmable micro computer which interfaces with homemade periferals), but hadn’t gotten so far as to invest in one, when I heard about the netduino. The netduino is an Arduino for .Net coders. It runs the .Net Micro Framework, so you can write code in C# in Visual Studio.Net and then deploy it directly to the USB connected netduino.

Ever since I downloaded the MineCraft Canary for my Android, which lets me know what time of day it is on the surface, I wanted to make an electronic version using LEDs. I am not yet skilled enough to make a version using just electronic components from scratch (you know – the oldfashioned way with soldering and stuff), so I thought “Why not use the netduino?” :).

After quite a bit of fiddling around, and learning that the .Net Micro Framework doesn’t have Linq, Generics, and a host of other things I take for granted these days – I got a little working solution running.

- the really simple, written in one Program.cs file, which only uses the netduino boards button and LED
- a more advanced one which supports any number of inputs and notification components in a class hierarchy which implements interfaces for a code-your-own-extension style app.
They are both available for download here

If you have the Electronic Brick Starter Kit, you need the ?LiquidCrystal library for interfacing with the LCD display.